I just want to say thank you to all those who have left comments and sent messages this week. The hardest part of this journey is the mental aspect of the process.  I am still battling the notion of whether I am worth the end result.  My family has made sacrifices so I can go to a gym and have a trainer. The cycle I experience is one of guilt, then shame, then I give up.  I have been in this circular pattern for most of my life.  I realize that I still have a lot to do in my mind before I can make big gains physically.

I made my big losses before, because I experienced a feeling of not wanting to go on in life.  I had to make a choice of actually being there for my family or truly giving up.  I chose life, and now I am 80 pounds down and more active, I feel like I accomplished my main goal.  I can walk with my family and run with Lucas and now I need to find strong motivation again.  I keep thinking about the birth of my daughter and I thought that would be enough, but for some reason it just isn’t enough.

This week has been a great experience in trying to find myself and my motivation again.  I know now that I did so well before, because it was life or death.  Now I need to have smaller and more frequent goals to keep me on track.  I am still not going to let the scale dominate me, but I need to be aware of it.  I need to keep pushing with running and doing more 5K’s.  I really should do a C25K program.  The last time I ran a 5K, I did no training.  I didn’t do poorly, but my body was definitely not ready.  Now that I have some awesome shoes, I am ready to start pursuing that more.

I wish I could explain how much it means to me that you are along here with me.  Even when I am away, you still look on and leave me comments.  To know there are people out there that care enough to hold me up when I want to run away is very humbling.  In many ways I don’t feel like I deserve it, even though you have told me many times I do.

I know I let myself become inundated with other’s opinions of myself.  I need to think more of myself than I do and I hope one day to achieve that goal.  No matter what, I know that there are many out there that do care about me… and I will never forget you.  And just when I think that no one cares about what I say, you slap me around and make me admit I know it is a lie.  Also, I was shocked to find myself on this list.  Now I don’t know how much of an expert the radiologyschools.com site is, but to be included with the level of people on that list is truly amazing.  And I don’t know if they rank them numerically, but I ended up number 27.  So even though it may be some arbitrary list of people, just to find my name along others who have inspired me and continue to inspire others is truly an amazing experience.

Well that started out to be a short update, but it turned out longer than I expected.  Bottom line is that I am awestruck by your support.  I only hope that one day if you end up in a funk or low place that I can create some small glimmer of light in your life.  You all mean the world to me and I love you all!